Their audit doesn’t bother me much, mostly because I’m using the eminimalls in page space that wasn’t doing well with Adsense but is doing great now.

I was burnt way back in 2000 with a company called startpath, so I am always suspicious when stuff like this happens and there is explanation after the fact.

I’ll be trying out YPN for December and will decide whether or not to go back to Chitika after I see my November numbers.

One one channel in particular I had thirteen days with just one click and fourteen days with two clicks. None of the days with one click were audited, every day with two clicks was.

That doesn’t seem very random to me. Maybe I should go to Vegas…

Their clicks paid me 7-10X more than a click from AdSense and they paid me. I have no complaints, BUT I will say this:

I get more from ads that pay me monthly stipends than I do from PPC driven ads and I get paid BEFORE they go on my site and IRREGARDLESS of whether or not people click on them. That, my friend, is da stuff of dreams.

1. yes you’re wrong with the business model. They don’t earn affiliate commissions from what I know of them but rather get paid from advertisers per click. The ads are served via feeds.

2. yep they are small and have limited resources to throw at their backend and reports. Valid points though – they need to work harder on their site design etc. But remember eMiniMalls are only a few months old and if you compare a lot of their back end to how they started they are improving.

3. Their Audit system does suck – waiting a month is crazy. I’ve told them this and they’ve said they are working on it.

4. Your conspiracy theory could be applied to any ad network. Google’s performance is so up and down but no one knows why. Sometimes we just have to trust companies – if we don’t we’ll never get anywhere. I know of quite a few other chitika publishers who earn very good money with the product but don’t talk about it so I really doubt this.

5. An invite system would have been a good idea. They’ve grown very quickly which is both good and bad.

6. Spot on about them not hiding anything. People should read terms and conditions, FAQ, support area before signing up and see what is and isnt excluded.

7. how long can the big figures last? Who knows – but all I know is that I earn a lot more from them still even after all the ‘problems’ than I used to and more than double any other program that I’ve used. I don’t think this is because I get a ‘deal’ but because I’ve worked my butt off to optimize the ads and work out where they work best (something that I see many publishers have not done – ie so many use default settings that it’s no wonder they don’t earn much. I saw one guy on a pet website complaining about their poor performance – he was showing ipod ads…go figure).

8. Yep they’ve got some problems and need to sort out their auditing system – but for a fairly new product I think they’ve come a long way and have real potential.

shit – now I’m late….

I got nicked 19% or so in the audit, which I wasn’t pleased about, but it was better than a lot of others got.

Last but not least, I got paid.

Since I didn’t displace anything else, that’s pretty much found money.

I’d like to see them do a lot of things differently (real time “audited” stats, faster payment), but I’m willing to keep them up until they don’t pay, or the payout drops more — or somebody else pays better in the same piece of ad inventory.

It looks to me like their biggest problem is setting expectations — if they showed just the “audited” stats (in near realtime, preferably, but even on the day after like they do now), everyone would have known where they stood, and we’d have all been relieved to see that they paid.

The way it stands now, everybody expected X, and got a percent of X. That’s going to inevitably lead to some unhappiness.

Doesn’t say much for me though, but hey, whatever. Screw’em, I always thought their tabbed ads looked like crap. ;-)